Schooling the World was made a decade ago and it completely relevant even today - if anything even more so. In that time, I lost half a dozen family elders who grew up a different way, had values different from mine and were part of the organism that was their community. The notion of "I" was ill-formed for them at best. There was no question about doing what it took to support younger siblings and aging parents. If someone from the village came around, they were supported until they were able to land on their feet. These folks had lost their way of life and livelihood through the partition of India in 1947 but they had not given up on their values yet.
That took a couple of more generations, the nuclearization of the family and western schooling to get there. Today, my generation of the family has very limited connection to each other and what little we do is staged and managed on social media like an interpretive performance. Being that I have no presence there, puts me out of the discussion for the most part. I am clinging to the few strands of real human relationships that are still left - with my uncles and aunts.
The are two great aunts left in the extended family both in pretty bad physical health. They bounce between hospital and home as their kids try to eke out more time in what's left of their frayed lives. The light is gone, there is nothing to talk about with them anymore. Their end of life did not at all turn out like that of their older siblings that died many decades ago. Back then, family was bigger, someone was always around, care was mostly palliative and no one tried extra hard to fight for another month or year. The end came naturally and everyone was prepared for it.
Today thanks to the "better" western schooling that the kids and grand-kids have received, the ties to the roots are tenuous at best, understanding of culture and religion shaky and the priorities completely different. Everyone is out there trying to succeed, make more and live better. There is no time for introspection. Since we can't really be there for our elderly parents and integrate them fully into our lives like previous generations did, we absolve our guilt by paying the medical system to pull all manner of stunts to prolong their lives. We have decided to throw money at the problem because that is all we are capable of doing.
I am just as guilty as the rest and have not raised my kid in the tradition of my ancestors because I was neither well-versed in that are nor understood why that was important. Within the span of just two generations of western schooling in my own family, we have managed to fully destroy what it meant to be people from my ancestral village in Bangladesh who lived their lives a certain way for many hundred years that we have record of. I have become a nowhere person myself and have raised a child to be even more disconnected from her roots than I was.
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